Red Hat Sued Over Hibernate ORM Patent Claim

fmarines writes "Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around JBoss 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestar's patent, and that Firestar 'has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages.' Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestar press release page."

Comments

before it gets slashdotted...

[N3wsByt3]

Red Hat Sued Over Hibernate 3 ORM Patent Infringement Claim
Posted by Floyd Marinescu on jun 29, 2006 09:40 PM

Community Java Topics Legal Matters, Data Access, Business
Firestar Software has filed a patent claim against Red Hat for infringing on a patent Firestar filed in 2000 covering O/R mapping. The amount of the lawsuit was not disclosed. The complaint centers around JBoss 3, and the patent claims that JBoss was given prior notice that marketing, distribution, and support services violates Firestars patent, and that Firestar "has suffered and will continue to suffer substantial damages." Firestar produces the ObjectSpark, an transactional object mapping engine which appears to not have had a new release since May 2003, according to the Firestars press release page.

The patent covers (from US Patent office patent # 6,101,502):
A method for interfacing an object oriented software application with a relational database, comprising the steps of:

selecting an object model;
generating a map of at least some relationships between schema in the database and the selected object model;
employing the map to create at least one interface object associated with an object corresponding to a class associated with the object oriented software application; and
utilizing a runtime engine which invokes said at least one interface object with the object oriented application to access data from the relational database. ide interface objects that are utilized by an object oriented software application to access the relational database.
Interestingly, the same patent (follow link for full PDFs) was filed under a different company name to the European patent office back in 1998, but was withdrawn. The patent is not related to yet another patent Mapping architecture for arbitrary data models filed in 2005.

Patent experts told InfoQ that the lawsuit appears to be skillful manoeuvring on Firestar's part; they waited until after the JBoss Red Hat acquisition intentions were announced and notified JBoss about the potential infringement on May 26th, which was within the JBoss Red Hat due dilligence period. This would have required JBoss to either instantly settle with Firestar or be forced to notify Red Hat which could have cancelled the acquisition deal, which was announced as finalized on June 5th (with Red Hat aware of the risks). Firestar then notified Red Hat on June 7th that they were in violation of Firestar's patent. As a further example of manoeuvring, the word among patent experts is that the specific district Firestar selected to perform the lawsuit in (eastern district of Texas) is famous among patent circles because a patent claimant has never lost a lawsuit there.

It seems clear that the timing of the lawsuit was designed to take advantage of the Red Hat acquisition. Firestar certainly had other potential targets, including Oracle (TopLink), BEA (Kodo), and even the JCP (EJB JPA).

Note: updated June 29th, 10:40pm

Re:This is the definition of an obvious patent

[mikeburke]

Exactly. They'll have to go after TopLink as well, which certainly predates 2000. Hell, I was working with a commercial framework called 'Persistence' in 1997 that used a similar approach (albeit in C++).

Ohm, Prior art?

[Sweetshark]

All these projects have been registered before or in 2000 (when the patent has been filed according to TFA):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgrinder
http://sourceforge.net/projects/leap
http://sourceforge.net/projects/neo
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nexusproject

As this is a patent it shouldnt matter too much, if they actually had a working implementation at that time. (IANAL and all that jazz).

smalltalk

[Anonymous Coward]

Smalltalk at an OR/M mapping engine from about 1994. I think I'm right in saying it was subsequently acquired by Oracle, ported to Java and became know as Toplink. In any case it's a pretty clear-cut prior art so the patent won't stand if anyone wants to defend it.

Re:This is the definition of an obvious patent

[TheRaven64]

NeXT had an OR mapper in WebObjects over a decade ago, so either you can implement an OR mapper without violating this patent or there is prior art (since the patent was only filed in 2000, 4 years after NeXT had a shipping product).

Re:This is the definition of an obvious patent

[mzwaterski]

I'll admit I didn't read the article, I just skimmed for the patent number (these articles never correctly characterize the patent anyway). The patent number is: 6101502. According to the USPTO that patent was filed on September 25, 1998 and issued August 8, 2000. The patent also claims priority to a provisional filed December 9, 1997 and a provisional filed September 26, 1997. Presumably some claims can use that as their earliest date. Feel free to check it for yourself:

http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P TO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2F srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,101,502.PN.&OS=PN/6, 101,502&RS=PN/6,101,502

and

http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/!ut/p/_s.7 _0_A/7_0_CH/.cmd/ad/.ar/sa.getBib/.c/6_0_69/.ce/7_ 0_1ET/.p/5_0_18L/.d/1?selectedTab=fileHistorytab&i sSubmitted=isSubmitted&dosnum=09161028#7_0_1ET